PALO ALTO, CA — Facebook, Inc, the firm that owns and operates Facebook, the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, today announced that the latest change in layout and functionality was designed to piss their users off.

“We were honestly getting tired of having too many members,” said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckeberg at a Press Conference held at the company headquarters. “So we’ve been trying very, very hard to discourage new members from signing up, and make it as hard as possible for current members to go about Facebooking.”

“‘Facebooking’? Is there such a word?” asked Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO. “Oh well, you’re the founder, I guess you can coin whatever term you want,” she continued, laughing.

Among the notable changes introduced to the site, which brings the company an estimated US$300 million a year, were the re-positioning of the ‘Home’ and ‘Profile’ menu bars, as well as the introduction of new and completely irrelevant icons representing ‘Notification’, ‘Messages’ and ‘Friend Request’. Mostly used applications like games, which appeared at the bottom panel on every Facebook page, now only appears on the ‘Home’ page, on the left column. The Boring Blue theme colour remains unchanged.

ZUCKERBERG: Hopes the new UI will piss people off royally

“We’ve tried so many ways to get rid of users, from introducing different settings that don’t mean anything, to bugging them with annoying apps,” said Zuckerbeg. “What we found was that the best way to piss people off is to change the User Interface (UI) so often, they get confused.”

“Hell, I’m kinda confused with the new layout, bro,” Sandberg interjected. “I was looking for the notification thingy on the bottom left of the screen and it wasn’t there. An hour later I chanced upon it, right by our logo. Impressive.”

“We’ve pissed our users off before,” said Zuckerberg, noting that the last time they changed the UI last year, Facebook’s hotline email was flooded with irrate complaints. “We lost a few thousand members, who decided to go to MySpace and other inferior social network sites. This time around, we aim to lose at least 30 per cent of our 350 million active members.

“We’re just simply tired of all this success,” said the 25-year-old, said to be worth around US$2 billion. “They say ‘money can’t buy happiness’, well I have to second that. Now I spend my days lazing about, doing nothing interesting.

“I just wish I was dirt poor again, before Facebook changed all that. I was happier.”

“On that note, I hope our latest move doesn’t backfire,” said Sandberg. “We’ve had reports of some people being happy with the new UI. Imagine that. Despite all our efforts to spit on their faces, they keep on coming back for more. What the fuck is wrong with them?”

“There’ll always be some sort of masochistic individuals out there, dude,” replied Zuckerberg.

“Maybe we’ll need to start charging them for every status change or photo upload. Then maybe these suckers will stop coming to our site. A buck for a status update, and maybe five bucks for a superpoke.”

“We can’t do that, Mark,” said Sandberg. “We’re trying to get rid of them because we’re making too much money. Charging ’em will just bring us even more money!

“Facebook has become a monster,” added Zuckerberg, sadly. “People are spending more time on it than on real life or doing work. Our creation is slowly eroding productivity everywhere, and has destroyed countless lives,” he said, referring to the divorces caused by inter-Facebook affairs and careless Facebook comments which have led to people being embarrassed, and even fired from their jobs.

“We hope people will get pissed off and leave us. We’re praying so. But there’s only so much we can do.”